Sprint Cup Series Director John Darby, left, and Competition Director Robin Pemberton, center, discuss changes to bump-drafting on Thursday. (The Birmingham News -- Doug Demmons)The gloves are off, the rules have been torn up and the sheriff is looking the other way.

NASCAR is opening the throttle all the way on racing at Talladega and Daytona.

“We’re going to put it back in the hands of the drivers.” Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s competition director said Thursday in announcing a loosening of the sport’s rules at its biggest tracks. “Boys, have at it and have a good time. That’s all I can say.”

The biggest change involves bump-drafting, the practice of one car bumping and pushing another all the way around the track that makes both go faster. NASCAR cracked down on bump-drafting through the turns at Talladega in October out of safety concerns.

But fans complained long and loud that the crackdown turned the race into a boring single-file parade for much of its 500 miles. So NASCAR is backing away and allowing its drivers to police themselves.

Another big change involves the restrictor plates on carburetors that are used at Talladega and Daytona to reduce engine horsepower. The plates restrict the flow of air into the carburetors with four holes. NASCAR adjusts the size of those holes constantly to slow the cars down or speed them up.

This year the holes in the plates will be larger than they have been in more than 20 years.

One change that NASCAR considered but rejected was modifiying the yellow-line rule that marks out of bounds at the bottom of the track. Talladega and Daytona are the only tracks with such a rule.

Most drivers this week expressed concern that getting rid of an out-of-bounds area would be far too risky.

“There was a lot of debate,” Pemberton said of meetings between NASCAR officials, team owners and drivers. “We threw it out there. It was not 50-50. It probably wasn’t even 70-30.”

There was a suggestion to lift the yellow-line rule just for the final lap, but that was also rejected.

“We will look at it at a later date but for now it will be in place from green flag to checkered,” Pemberton said.

John Darby, director of the Sprint Cup Series, said drivers “will be their own governing body” when it comes to bump-drafting and the changes will bring about “some of the best restrictor-plate racing we’ve ever seen.”

The third big change formally announced on Thursday involves an end to the wing on the back of the car that fans had come to despise. NASCAR will instead revert to the spoilers it used before it introduced the Car of Tomorrow.

That change won’t be implemented right away as the spoilers are still going through tests. At Daytona, the wing will still be in use and will have a new side plate that will add drag to the car, thus slowing it down.

Darby said that’s why the restrictor plates were made larger – to compensate for the added drag.

But the wing will be gone by April for the first Talladega race. Despite that, Darby said, NASCAR will use the same larger plate at Talladega that it will use at Daytona so that teams will not have to build separate engines for the two plate tracks.

By next year the restrictor plates might be gone completely. Pemberton said that NASCAR hopes to introduce fuel injection to the sport in 2011, eliminating the need for the antiquated carburetors that manufacturers haven’t used in their cars for decades.

Talladega Superspeedway President Rick Humphrey was all smiles after the announcements.

“We got feedback from our fans after the fall race that it wasn’t what they had come to expect at Talladega,” he said. “Today’s announcement is good for us.”